Revisiting the Kitchen

September 8, 2016

Just like the living room, this kitchen reveal has been A LONG time coming. While I’d love to be able to just focus on one room at a time, get them done, and then move onto another, that doesn’t work when you’re furiously trying to get a house functional to live in. We got the house functional for us to move in one year ago and then haven’t finished all of the pretty details because we moved on to do silly things like create working bathrooms.

But now this room’s time has come. A lot has changed in this space over the last month and I have so much to share! Recently, we got a fun potential opportunity for this house that is still in the making, but it made us fly in and finish any remaining renovations. Finishing the kitchen, exterior, and other details to meet that deadline was crazy. This is one of the main things I was referring to in last week’s post that’s kept me from blogging quite as much lately, but will be exciting if/when this happens! Sadly, it didn’t leave a ton of time to blog about all of these finishes we were furiously doing. But, now we have tons to share!

But before I reveal the kitchen and share all of the details, I thought it would be a good idea to re-visit the plans and where we’ve been so far. You guys seemed to like that with the living room and I think it’s needed when there’s this much time in between.

Y’all may remember that this room was added onto the house, so our before is just an empty sheet-rocked space. The original kitchen was a little 5×5 kitchenette in the front of the house (what’s actually my closet now).

I still love this original design. The main change that has happened is not doing the brick wall. I’m still sad about that one, but it just didn’t work for this space. I like brick walls to look like they could be original, so I didn’t want it as a backsplash. I knew it needed to be floor or counter to ceiling on the wall. With our huge open space, that just wasn’t possible without carrying it into the dining room and spending a massive amount of money, so that part got scratched.

But the rest of this design stayed on! I’ve dreamed of white kitchens for years and finally got that in our last house.

Oh I loved that kitchen. But to me, new houses are always a way to try something new. I fell in love with the idea of dark green cabinets and as soon as they were installed, I knew it was the right choice.

Let’s take a look at progress shots.

This is the stage we got our kitchen to not long after moving in this time last year and it’s literally where it stayed until a month or so ago.

This room provided a lot of challenges for me. You’d think designing in a new space would be easy because you aren’t working with existing quirks and limitations, but that wasn’t the case for us. Needing the two doors over there in the corner really broke up the layout and we kept having to go back to the drawing board to get it to all work in our minds. It ended up working out well on this wall above because while I wish we didn’t have to have those doors there, I do like the symmetry of the long island centered in front of the stove (and the hood that was coming!).

But that left this small “unit” over on the other side sort of floating. This area has bothered and bothered us! But I think we’ve finally made it work as best as we can with the space. Y’all may remember that a tile backsplash was a big debate over here. We desperately needed tile behind the sink. Living with this amazing (but forceful) sprayer on the faucet for just a few days showed us the sheetrock would stay soaked. But because of how it’s floating on this huge wall with only sconces above, there was no clear place to stop the tile. I spent a lot of time mulling this one over, but we finally figured out a solution that wasn’t completely ideal to me, but it was functional for us.

Living so long with this room unfinished really made me question and re-design some things I’d already pictured, but seeing it start to come together has been so rewarding for sure. It all worked out!

I actually bought this vintage Persian rug from eBay before we’d even found the new house, but I just knew the color combos in it had to go with my green cabinets. Thankful the size and spacing worked out!

You can see all of the in-progress shots here, in case you missed that post.

And here’s a little sneak peek I shared last week on Instagram! She’s finally looking like a kitchen!

That sneak peek kind of gives a lot away, but y’all have waited long enough! Stay tuned next week for more kitchen details and goodness. I’ll share lots of photos, but also address why we chose certain things.

Here’s a link to all of the posts I did about this kitchen from planning to progress (in case you need to catch up before next week’s reveal!):